Accessing asset in Watson Studio notebook (.log file) using 'with open' and 'project-lib'

Question

I'm trying to deploy a working python 3.6 notebook in Watson Studio (cloud). However I'm struggling to access files/assets. After uploading a .log file to my assets, I want to open and process it using

with open(project.get_file('messages.log'), 'r') as file:

the error message returns

TypeError: expected str, bytes, or os.PathLike object, not _io.BytesIO

Apart from telling me how to open/read the log-file, I'd also appreciate a short explanation on why project.get_file returns a BytesIo object.

Answer 1

project-lib's function get_file reads the file from your Watson Studio project's storage. You can read your file like this:

buffer = project.get_file('messages.log')
log_file = buffer.getvalue()

I am not hundred percent sure why it has been decided to return a BytesIo object but it is quite convenient e.g. if you want to read your data into a pandas dataframe:

my_file = project.get_file('myFile.csv')
my_file.seek(0)
import pandas as pd
pd.read_csv(my_file, nrows=10)

You can find project-lib's documentation here: project-lib for Python